osX on G3 -- preferences (& more?) lost on reboot

[lunchbill]

Using OSX 10.2.3, I did a restart yesterday on my G3 (from the dialogue window, not a forced reboot) and when the machine came back on all my preferences were gone. Lost my homepage, as well as all my bookmarks and prefs on Safari. Entourage thinks it is starting up for the first time--wants to set up a new account. All my email hist is gone, including address book. Most preferences across the system seem to have reset to defaults. Desktop image went to the generic blue Mac image. The dock came up expanded to maximum size.

It is as thought I zapped the PRAM, though I did not do that. And all my mail files--a PRAM zap shouldn't affect those.

Anyone have any idea what's happening here? Is it possible the old mail files are stil in the computer, just not accessible for some reason? Where are they?

Someone suggested I could be running out of disk space, but I don't think that is the case. The computer was upgraded with a second hard drive recently. (I can't get in touch with my tech guy.)

Any help much appreciated.

 

[Nytemagik]

you logged into a clean account somehow.

Go look at your accounts pane, see if there is a second guest type account and if autologin is turned on.

I have had a couple of my users have this type of thing happen but was always able to find and restore the email and preferences. That's cause if this is the problem, they'll be safely tucked away in a different home directory.

I would also get off 10.2.x. Alot of the flavors of the early OS X's had different issues.


John

 

[lunchbill]

you logged into a clean account somehow.

Go look at your accounts pane, see if there is a second guest type account and if autologin is turned on.

I have had a couple of my users have this type of thing happen but was always able to find and restore the email and preferences. That's cause if this is the problem, they'll be safely tucked away in a different home directory.

I would also get off 10.2.x. Alot of the flavors of the early OS X's had different issues.


John

Yes, that's the conclusion I'm comming to also: some kind of new user account was automatically set up as the default instead of my regular account.

Why? I'm not sure yet.

Someone suggested it might be a low battery. Gonna replace it and see what happens.

btw, typo above: my system is 10.3.9

 

[Nytemagik]

Sounds like a good place to start. Even a dead internal battery shouldn't have deleted a user account, so the info should still be there. My next advice would be to delete the < hopefully found> account, saving the info into an archive image. back that up and rebuild the system from scratch.
Who knows what damage might have been done to the critical files.
Then keeping the clean account created during the fresh build as a test/backup account, create a new one and import all the data from the image you saved elsewhere.

Let us know

John